Consignment shops (sometimes called ‘drop shops’) offer a great service for helping people sell their items on eBay. However, to avoid even the appearance of Shill Bidding, owners or employees of consignment shops may never bid on the items the shop offers for sale. If the consignment shop is part of an extended franchise operation, individuals employed within any part of the franchise are not allowed to bid on items listed by any franchise member.

When a member’s eBay business grows, they sometimes hire employees to help with that business. Bidding on a seller’s item by individuals employed by the seller – in any role – is a violation of eBay’s Shill Bidding policy. As an eBay member and an employer, you are responsible for actions of your employees as they affect your account and your eBay business. It’s important that your employees understand and follow eBay’s policies. eBay has suspended member accounts as a result of actions by those member’s employees.

Add to that, much like the shill bidding policy change, there are some very convincing reasons to believe this unannounced change was also very recent and made without too much planning, and/or in great haste:

Did someone have a few “oops!” moments when they forgot to change everything to match?

To add another heapin’ helpin’ to the notion it was very recently changed, much like the shill bidding policy, other English language sites such as ebay India, still have the questions 8 and 9, and a full 13 questions to the tutorial.

So far I have not found any ebay site on the planet where those questions were removed other than the USA. Try it yourself.

Again, note that the content removed dealt with consignment shops and individuals bidding on their employer’s goods.

If you read the post about the shill bidding policy change you know they left very conflicting info on the policy Vs Tutorial pages for the USA.

So what in tarnation is going at ebaY? Golly gee, all the flurry about the [alleged] shill bidding VH1 House of Consignment Reality TV star Corri McFadden edropoff scandal, SLAPP censorship and lawsuits breaking out couldn’t have anything to do with it? Could it?

What do you think? Cover-up? Whitewash? Coincidence? Sloppy website keeping?

Update:

Looks like ebaY may have another Oops! moment, as they still have those now missing questions (and all 13 questions) featured live on the current non-javascript or text only version of the page for the USA: (click for larger view)

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This is simply a clumsy attempt to justify the fact that they still have not yet thrown McFadden under that bus. An attempted, clumsy cover up surely; but they are so habitually incompompetent, they can’t even do that effectively; they certainly don’t effectively do anything about the rampant shill bidding that they effectively facilitate on eBay nominal-start auctions …

Well i see eBay corrected the number of pages in the tutorial. But the Introduction still says there are 13 questions. Watch them fix that real quick too. ROTFLMFAO at eBay’s Incompetency.

Unfortunately eBay Policy does not supersede U.S. Federal Law!

US Code, Title 18, Part I, Chapter 63, §1343, “Fraud by wire, radio, or television”, is the applicable Federal statute:

“Whoever, having devised or intending to devise any scheme or artifice to defraud, or for obtaining money or property by means of false or fraudulent pretenses, representations, or promises, transmits or causes to be transmitted by means of wire, radio, or television communication in interstate or foreign commerce, any writings, signs, signals, pictures, or sounds for the purpose of executing such scheme or artifice, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both. …”

Notice how broad that definition is. Any form of cheating to gain an advantage is criminal fraud. Undisclosed vendor (shill) bidding on an eBay auction, for the purpose of inflating the price, clearly falls under that definition and it is therefore a Federal crime. eBay’s effective and knowing aiding and abetting of such activity could also be found to be a crime, that of “criminal facilitation”— hxxp://en . wikipedia.org/wiki/A…..egal_term)

eBay’s quite deliberate actions, eg, the further anonymising of bidders with virtually meaningless, non-unique bidding IDs, to obscure (and aid the denial of) such criminal activity could be considered such a criminal facilitation.

The U.S.criminal code makes aiding and abetting a federal crime itself a crime:

A person may be convicted of aiding and abetting any act made criminal under the code [eg, ‘wire fraud’]. The elements of aiding and abetting are, generally:
(1) guilty knowledge on the part of the accused (the mens rea);
(2) the commission of an offense by someone; and
(3) the defendant assisted or participated in the commission of the offense (the actus reus).

That definition should be broad enough to catch eBay in their effective aiding and abetting of such shill bidding fraudsters, before, during, and after the fact.

Harrah! eBay and everybody selling thereon are now going great guns! Absolutely everything is now selling! Everyone who lists on eBay will now have a 100% success rate! At last, the US economy as turned the corner, according to eBay, apparently.

From now on everything that is listed on eBay will appear to sell—even if it doesn’t. There will be no more of those unsightly and embarrassing oceans of “red” on sellers’ “completed listing” pages (of course there may not be many sold items listed either); these oceans will now only appear in the soothing (and deceptive) “green” of success.

eBay is making the business of buying on eBay more and more opaque by the minute. There is only one reason for such opacity and that is to deceive consumers. In my humble opinion, this latest change is simply another indication of the depths that the unscrupulous eBay will go to to deceive its consumers in the pursuit of protecting its atrophying bottom line; it’s unethical at the least; and I invite readers to again read the definition of fraud.

US Code, Title 18, Part I, Chapter 63, §1343, “Fraud by wire, radio, or television”:

“Whoever, having devised or intending to devise any scheme or artifice to defraud, or for obtaining money or property by means of false or fraudulent pretenses, representations, or promises, transmits or causes to be transmitted by means of wire, radio, or television communication in interstate or foreign commerce, any writings, signs, signals, pictures, or sounds for the purpose of executing such scheme or artifice, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both. …”

Regardless, when you deal with eBay (and many of its merchants) you are dealing with a most unscrupulous entity; you should always keep a very firm grip on your wallet/purse whenever you are logged on.

Whoops! My mistake. I generalized and that was wrong (now I’m in for it); I’ll have to apologise to eBay, sort of. I was watching an item on the below seller; it finished and did not appear in the “Completed listings”.

These are BIN/BO items; it is apparently the case that if unsold they simply roll over and start again and never show as unsold; they only appear in the completed list if and when they are sold, it seems.

Am I the only one who has a hard time believing that the ebay community isn’t concerned about this? I Notice they haven’t seem to have heard about the secret policy and tutorial changes yet on the ebay forums bidding board of all places.

The standard shill bidding tutorial page has been changed again. It now shows it shows question 7 of 11 etc instead of ‘question 7 of 13′. The non -javascript version is still the same as shown above. Sloppy cover-up. They never did say when and why these things were changed but I think we all know…

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